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I have built up hundreds of echoes now and am finding some great environmental correlations that are teaching me to look at fishing differently. I am teaching my 3 and 8 year old boys the mechanics of fishing so I am looking for maximum time impact, making us more efficient on the water. I need more trips where we get out there, whack them, and get back. I decided to use 20echo to form incremental knowledge by focusing on the alignment of conditions at specific times, not just the overall macro outlook of one day or hour span. I don’t want to disappoint the family when we finally get a chance to go fishing so I needed to find as many condition intersections that have the potential to spark a bite as possible. This tactic is simple in theory – Find enough condition intersections to ensure I have at least one happening every day of the year to always have a best time to fish. The first condition intersection I have found and will highlight today is falling pressure and solunar rise and set.

Falling pressure January Speckled Trout. 12:05pm with moonrise at 11:51am

Since winter is on the way I wanted to focus on falling pressure. I quickly noticed that no matter the time of year, when I fished pressure that had marked downward tendency I was almost always catching fish. After sliding the 20echo query bars around it was obvious that a lot of our falling pressure fish were caught in the morning and evening as the sun was coming up and going down. That is my first condition intersection. When I started looking at the correlation of falling pressure in concert with moonrise and moonset even more flags started lighting up all over Texas & Louisiana on my 20echo dashboard. Almost every falling pressure echo was matched by the sun or moon rising or setting within one hour regardless what time of day or night it happened. Every kind of fish showed up at this condition intersection, trout to pelagics at all times of day or night. For my world this is exciting and leads to one fact, NOT THEORY. I catch more fish when the pressure is falling and the sun and/or moon is rising and/or setting.

Falling pressure March Wahoo. Caught at 8:15am with the sunrise at 7:11am and the moon set at 9:08am

When we built 20Echo we knew we were undertaking a task that people have been trying to master since the beginning of civilization. How can we better understand the best time to hunt and fish to capitalize from time on the water or in the field? In our preliminary research we started at the beginning and noticed quickly that people have been trying to pattern fish and game forever. Even the first fishing logs drawn in caves show Native Americans knew certain times were better for fishing and hunting than others. These drawings and other examples display that humans have known life is more active around dawn and dusk and when the moon is full or new for millennia. As time pressed forward it was discovered that the moon also played a role in controlling ocean behavior. The discovery of tides made the sun and moon the cornerstones for the earliest forms of the fishing calendars and fishing logs. It was not until 1926 that someone actually put methodology in place to begin leveraging this information, enter Solunar Tables.

In May 1926,John Alden Knight compiled a list of 33 factors which were thought to influence the natural behavior of both fresh and saltwater fish. In his experiments all but three of these factors were disproven in the capacities he was testing. The only three factors left standing were sun, moon and tide. As Knight’s research progressed he realized that the sun, moon and tide were actually related so he built what he called the “Solunar Tables”. These tables were first published in 1936 and were the original source of major and minor feeding times. He proved his tables by creating afishing log of 200 record catches showing that 90% were made during his predefined major and minor cycles and while the moon was new. Yahtzee.. Knight was on to something!

Knight’s major & minor theory was later supported by a Biologist atNorthwestern University inChicago. This Biologist, Dr. Frank A. Brown, became fascinated with the biological rhythm of the ocean at a young age after catching rare shrimp off a dock. He went back every night and did not see the shrimp again until exactly one lunar month later. He noticed this and devoted his life to understanding why. Later, Dr. Brown had live oysters flown into his lab in Chicago to further prove his theories on the rhythm of the ocean. It is common knowledge that oysters open their shells at each high tide to feed and Dr. Brown wanted to see if this was caused by local changes in water flow (tide) or as John Knight hypothesized, from Solunar influences.

By taking the oysters out of their natural rhythm and environment for a week he discovered that the organisms changed their opening and closing behavior to when the moon was directly overhead and underfoot in Chicago. This was further fascinating because the oysters were not outside and were now in a different time zone meaning that light and electromagnetic influence were not necessarily contributing factors. Dr. Brown concluded that this is only possible if organisms have astoundingly subtle ways of sensing external environmental changes “right through the laboratory walls”. He said that “All life is probably clued to its local circumstances in ways more intimately and more subtly than we can even measure, and when locality is changed, life senses that.”

How? Parts of this are still a mystery but like the drawings and tables that came before; 20Echo takes patterning to a level never before possible. We harness the power of every external environmental condition available and tag them to your pictures generating echoes from that exact location. These echoes allow you to never forget and instantly compare everything for the ultimate environmental leverage….Instinct like leverage previously reserved for ocean rhythm, oysters and tables.

DM

20Echo uses patent pending technology to harness the power of your pictures to form an instantaneous journal of your surrounding environmental conditions that is intuitive and simple to use. We allow users to snap pictures with mobile devices and instantly capture an automatic log that will help you catch more fish and better understand why and when things happen. Click to LEARN MORE.

Altimetry data will help you find fish offshore and is one of the most important conditions to consider when looking for pelagic activity. Below we will give some detail into what ocean altimetry is and why it’s important to fishermen.

Ocean Altimetry is the altitude of the ocean.

This value is a satellite product that is radar based so its measurement is never affected by cloud cover. High spots in the ocean surface column that are associated with positive values are not good for fishing and are called downwelling zones.

These are usually associated with nutrient-poor waters, the equivalent to ocean deserts.

Low spots in the ocean surface column associated by negative values are more ideal for fishing and are called upwelling zones.

Upwellings are nutrient-rich areas are much like rainforests and have everything needed to attract food for pelagic fish and other predators that are at the top of the food chain.

In these areas and on their borders cooler water from deep zones come up attracting fish. Neutral values around 0 are transitional areas, these are neither good nor bad and should be judged based on other conditions.

Many times these areas are found between upwelling and downwelling zones forming oceanic highways for targeted species.

20 Echo gathers Altimetry data and so much more automatically from your photos. Sign in

Jason 1 Satellite – Ocean Altimetry

Jason 1 was the first major satellite to focus on ocean altitude. Its success was followed by the Jason 2 satellite launching in 2008. The lineage of the name begins with the JASO1 meeting (JASO = Journées Altimétriques Satellitaires pour l’Océanographie) in Toulouse, France to study the problems of assimilating altimeter data in models. Jason as an acronym also stands for “Joint Altimetry Satellite Oceanography Network”. Additionally it is used to reference the mythical quest for knowledge of Jason and the Argonauts.

The only thing all naturally occurring events have in common is each has its own unique time and location. At 20echo our users harness that power through the most commonly shared medium in the world, digital pictures. 20echo provides outdoor enthusiasts with a private platform that will replace journals, photo albums, and even bolster campfire stories while providing users outdoor patterning capabilities never thought possible.